Comment by BunsanSpace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BunsanSpace | Hacker News Reader

"In the early 2000s, there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural, almost accidental. Skinny celebrities confessed their love of burgers and fries in magazines; models undergoing profile interviews engaged in public consumption of pasta; leading ladies joked about how little they exercised and how much they hated it. It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction. We knew it then, and we know it now."

No they where taking Clenbuterol or DNP which will make anyone lose weight like no tomorrow no mater their activity level. For a significant cost that is.

The more disturbing thing is male actors are clearly taking PEDs and/or being dehydrated for shirtless shots, distorting what a normal body should look like. Even in fitness circles where I live, no one looks that good without juicing or prepping their body for the shirtless pic.

[0] https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/hollywood-dirty-diet-...

Another example of dehydrating for shirtless shots - Henry Cavill talks about doing just that for The Witcher in an interview on the Graham Norton Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne5xD5XrzOc

i think its also worth noting that actors really exaggerate how hard is it to look good on camera and it ends up discouraging people from improving their diet and exercise.

you dont need a nutritionist, and a personal trainer, and to treat it like a full time jobs and get paid for it to look good.

you need to clean up your diet and do resistance training at least 3 times a week for an hour, and be consistent.

Combine that with how a cleaned up diet typically either costs more time or more money and working ~60 hours a week on minimum wage, yeah, that is pretty hard for a lot of people.

I heard on a genetics podcast recently that your weight is 70% genetically determined. Every family carries in its genome the similar ingredients for weight: how much do you eat, what foods do you like, how efficient is your body at gathering and storing energy, how much do you naturally like exercise, etc. That 30% is obviously important and most people could make huge gains there, simply by eating less.

ya but vegetable oil and corn fructose syrup did not exist >100 years ago as food products. we cook our food in wat used to be called boat varnish (vegetable oil)

yes you are correct, our genes are what determines weight in realtion to the foods you eat. it affects your bodies ability to metabolise those foods , etc

but most of the foods you eat, over 90% of what is available in walmart for instance, is industrial manufactured trash that no human except perhaps escaped roswell experiemnts and MBAs can metabolise correctly

this is compounded by modern trash propaganda telling people not to eat meat, to replace meat with synthetic mineral oils and watered down oats for $500 a litre

> ya but vegetable oil and corn fructose syrup did not exist 100 years ago

They absolutely did, from about the 1870's onward. Read about Harvey Washington Wiley. Modern food isn't a paragon of health, but for most non-rural people in the US, it was quite a bit worse from the 1870's to the 1910's.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Washington_Wiley

[2]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/poison-...

From that last one, they talk about a lot of honey simply being flavored corn syrup. There was swill milk. They put all sorts of weird conservatives into food before Wiley's Poison Squad determined what was safe.

not really.

"you need to clean up your diet and do resistance training at least 3 times a week for an hour, and be consistent."

It takes a lot more than that. A good diet and moderate exercise will keep you in a slim/lean shape, but it won't get you Hollywood ripped.

Actually having a muscular looking physic requires aggressive training, or naturally doing activity which requires lots of muscles (Dancing, climbing, acrobatics, sports).

most people dont actually care about looking like Thor. if you want to have visible abs and a decent amount of muscle (brad pitt in fight club), that can be achieved in a couple years of training/dieting for the majority of people

Along with dehydration, I'm surprised he does not mention salt/carb manipulation, which I'm sure he did as well.

Step 7 here is likely counterintuitive for most - to look big and shredded you typically want to carb-load right before the camera comes out: https://www.bodybuilding.com/content/7-scientific-steps-to-c...

Or they actually are naturally thin. Such people do exist and I refuse to believe most people haven't ever met someone like this. Why is it so hard to believe that the tiny fraction of people who make into Hollywood are selected for this trait?

I'm not saying they don't also do unnatural things to their bodies that set unrealistic standards and don't set a good example, but being "thin" is not one of them.

I don't think that's how it works. People you perceive as "naturally thin" probably simply:

* are used to not snacking between meals

* eat when they are hungry, and stop when they are not

* do not drink (excessively)

* are more-than-average active

Calories add up extremely quickly and it's very easy not to notice if you don't pay attention. Say you have one Mars bar per day, as a snack - that makes a difference of 10 kg of body weight per year as compared to someone who skips such a snack (a back-of-the-envelope calculation).

You really believe all bodies react the same to calories intake?

I don't see where they are arguing that. Are you referring to absorption and/or metabolic dysfunction?

Yes, (calories absorbed - calories burned) will always be true.

Yes, but some people's bodies will burn excess calories by generating heat while other's will immediately store it as fat. When it comes to nutrition, nothing is quite as simple as you hope.

I haven’t read much about the heat fact but the less body mass you have, the more you’d have to burn for heat (there is a relationship between body size and metabolic rate which is inversely proportional, small mammals and infants burn insane amounts of energy just keeping warm).

I did read a study on non exercise thermogenesis and how some people managed to burn quite a bit of calories just fidgeting throughout the day.

So while we all run around the same human body temperature and thermodynamics is all the same, different people arrive at different results because of different behaviors. To what extent they are genetic is up to debate but much is genetic like “a tendency to fidget” or “a tendency to like sweets”.

And what is "not natural" about any of that? Some people naturally regulate their intakes such that they don't get fat. It's not a conscious effort on their part. They eat what they want to and don't get fat. It's as simple as that.

There are certain breeds of dogs and cats that will eat until it makes them sick and easily get fat. Other breeds don't. Even with food readily available they just don't get fat. Humans are no different.

So I'm guessing you're fat?

Don't be rude

I'm naturally thin and so are both of my parents.

What is a PED? You mean performance-enhancing drugs?

I wanted to read the article you linked to, but seems like they have a region lock for EU countries. Its been what, nearly three years since GDPR took effect?

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

PED is a broad term for Performance-enhancing drugs.

There's two big categories, SARMs and Roids. Everyone knows roids, you take them, you get big. SARMs are lesser known but tend to lower body fat while preserving/gaining muscle (since normal cutting routine you will lose lots of muscle).

There's also fat burning drugs which are their own third category with DNP and Clenbuterol being the most common. Both are very dangerous and have a host of side effects, these are what hollywood/celebrities use to slim up fast.

It's a fantastic research rabbit hole to go down, and they're much more prevalent than you think.

Thanks for this answer, I don't go into the gym so I only knew steroids, and wasn't sure about the rest.

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